Interdiscplinary approaches to the 14th century crises in Europe

Joining the Network

If you are engaged in research connected to the 14th-century crises across Europe we would be very happy for you to join out network. Our aim is to connect students and experienced scholars from all disciplines.

We have choosen the form of a blog, as there are several possibilities for archiving and labelling the posts. We hope this encourages serious discussions and knowledge sharing.

Please write an email, with a short summary of your research interests and your academic affiliation, to:

10 thoughts on “Joining the Network”

I would be so grateful if you would consider me as a member of your network. I am near to completion on a book intended for young adults on the black death. I have spent considerable time researching this period of history and would appreciate being part of such a network in order to share my own information and gain knowledge from others.
Many thanks

I’d like to join your network. I’m a medieval art and architectural historian whose work focuses on commemoration of the dead. I’m also interested in material culture and economic history. While my current work is on sixteenth-century building laborers and their networks, I have published past articles on fourteenth-century tombs and church architecture, and I still continue to do work on memento mori images and cadaver tombs.
(I am told by my computer that Microsoft Outlook does not recognize the email address SchregATrgzm.de and will not send it, so am posting here on the page.)

I am working on the medieval and early modern conceptions of God as the author and origin of catastrophes with special interest in the theological interpretation of plagues, and I would to join your network.

I would like to join your network if possible. The email address: SchregATrgzm.de does not appear to work so I’ll apply here:

I am a PhD student in the Department of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology at the University of Liverpool, UK. My research involves bioarchaeological analyses of over 350 human skeletons from two key medieval monastic sites (9th to 16th century) in Britain.

My overall aim is to determine whether social and religious influences can be seen on the body, e.g. levels of meat consumption in communities that supposedly fasted according to the Rule of St Benedict. I apply osteology, palaeopathology and stable carbon and nitrogen isotope methods to look at aspects of diet, health and disease within medieval monastic communities.

I am an historian of medicine and infectious diseases currently finishing a monograph on morbidity and mortality in Sforza-era Milan. While I have written article-length studies involving analysis of fourteenth-century texts and the Black Death, my principal interests involve primarily analysis of early civic mortality registers, but secondarily, how we can connect plague experience to general Renaissance political and social history. Thus I work on this interdisciplinary topic in a slightly later historical period, and focus on urban plague experience.

I’m a historian of medieval medicine and also global health. I have been involved the past few years in trying to find ways to connect the narratives of the history of human health that are now emerging from the historicist sciences (bioarcheology and genomics, broadly writ) and traditional historical methods. I have twice conducted a postdoctoral seminar on medieval health and disease at the Wellcome Library in London. My interest in the Black Death is particularly to take the new scientific findings and use them as a foundation for examining the Black Death as a pandemic that affected many regions of Eurasia and North Africa, rather than privileging only its effects in Europe. My latest publication is Monica H. Green, “The Value of Historical Perspective,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to the Globalization of Health, ed. Ted Schrecker (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 17-37. I also work on many non-Black Death related topics in the history of medicine, most extensively now a general history of 12th-century medicine and the School of Salerno. I am the founder and list manager of MEDMED-L, a listserv for scholars interested in all aspects of premodern history of health and disease.

I am primarily an intellectual historian of the pre-modern Muslim world. I wrote my dissertation on the concept of contagion in Muslim and Christian Iberia and this subsequently appeared as Infectious Ideas: Contagion in Premodern Islamic and Christian Thought in the Western Mediterranean (Johns Hopkins, 2011). In addition I have written a short survey article on religious responses to the Black Death for History Compass. While my current research has shifted to examining the role played the natural sciences in seventeenth century Morocco, I continue to work on the plague in the Muslim world.

ISSN 2199-0891

Presentation

The 14th century AD was a profoundly tumultuous period in European history. Climatic deterioration in the first quarter of the century triggered harvest failures and human famine. In the middle of the century the Black Death swept through Europe killing 30–60% of the population.
Understanding of the 14th-century crises needs:
- a broad interdisciplinary approach, bringing together humanities and sciences;
- a comparative approach to enable the examination of different landscapes with their distinct historical and ecological background.
The Black Death Network intends
- to bring researchers from various disciplines together
- to create an interdisciplinary network sharing information on new research
- to connect students and experienced scholars from all disciplines